THE ADOPTION BUSINESS'S UNDERWORLD
By Doyle McManus
The Record
The young Minnesota couple waited expectantly at the airport for their newly adopted daughter, flying to them from war-ravaged El Salvador.
After months of waiting, reams of paper work, and thousands of dollars in fees, they seemed at last to have reached the end of an ordeal.
But when the 3-year-old girl arrived, something was wrong. Like many abandoned children rescued from Third World countries, she had scabies and lice. More disturbing, she was also visibly malnourished, and a pediatrician who examined her said that despite her small size she was not 3 years old at all, but possibly as old as 5.
What distressed her new parents the most, however, was a tale that emerged as they struggled to communicate with the distraught child: When she left El Salvador, the little girl had been traveling with a younger brother.
Somewhere along the way, an adoption agent had abruptly separated the two children sending the brother to some other, unknown family.
Far from home, the child desperately wanted her brother back. When her new parents asked the woman who had handled the two adoptions to contact the little boy, they were horrified to learn that his whereabouts could not be determined.
"She didn't know where he was," said a Massachusetts official who investigated. "She had delivered the boy to a couple in Massachusetts, but she had no idea where they lived. She had no records at all. "
From orphanages and slums, through a secretive network of Central American adoption lawyers and American "baby brokers," a small tide of Salvadoran children is washing into the United States about 1,300 over the past six years.
For those lucky enough to pass through the hands of careful agencies and scrupulous lawyers, the result can be new homes with loving families and an escape from poverty and the brutality of El Salvador's civil war.
For others, the road to a new life in the United States runs through an ugly netherworld of profiteering, exploitation, and neglect. It is a world tainted with fraud and indifference to the needs of children, where rules against abuse are too rarely enforced.
In some cases, Salvadoran babies have been bought from their natural mothers. U.S. diplomats fear others have even been stolen. Babies have been shipped into the United States with false birth certificates and adoption consent forms that their real mothers never signed.
Salvadoran authorities have convicted one baby finder of kidnapping three children. The woman testified that she had turned the children over to the agent of a prominent adoption lawyer for $160 each a lawyer who has arranged U.S. adoptions at fees reportedly as high as $6,500 per child.
The lure of profits has turned El Salvador's tiny adoption-law community into a circle of fear and intrigue. Some lawyers have made small fortunes, while others have fled the country after receiving anonymous threats.
Last year, a law clerk was killed by unknown assassins who proclaimed themselves the Salvadoran Protective Army, a new death squad sworn to guard the nation's infants against kidnappers.
In the United States, too, unscrupulous baby brokers have been drawn to the trade in Salvadoran children.
Authorities in Massachusetts, Minnesota, California, and other states have been attempting to crack down on adoption "facilitators" who charge would-be parents large amounts of money and promise them healthy babies but who then sometimes provide no children, children who are desperately ill, or children whose availability for adoption is questionable because they carry fraudulent adoption documents.
A federal grand jury in Boston is investigating the largest Salvadoran ring, after more than three years of detective work by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).
But so far, authorities in El Salvador and the United States have taken little effective action against those involved.
"Are people doing wrong things? Yes," a source close to the federal investigation said. "Is there enough evidence to result in a conviction? That's another question. A lot of stuff is in Central America, and it's hard to get. "
The roots of the problem spring from the way international adoptions work, and from the tragic consequences of El Salvador's civil war between the U.S.-backed government and leftist guerrillas.
In the United States as well as El Salvador, adoption is largely a private business, virtually unregulated in some states, in others legally subject to regulation but actually little-scrutinized.
No government agency in either country has sole responsibility or authority for supervising adoptions. Lawyers and private agencies do most of the work, matching couples with children and steering them through the legal maze.
"El Salvador is a rat's nest, a complicated maze of twists and turns," said Annabelle Illien, an Atlanta adoption agency owner who for three years has helped parents to adopt Salvadoran babies.
Nonetheless, American couples have found themselves drawn into the thicket of Salvadoran adoptions for one compelling reason: There is a shortage of adoptable babies in the United States and a surplus of unwanted babies in El Salvador.
More than 2 million U.S. couples want to adopt children, but only about 50,000 healthy infants come up for adoption in this country each year, according to the National Committee for Adoption, a Washington office funded by private adoption agencies.
El Salvador's six-year-old civil war, the collapse of El Salvador's economy, and the disintegration of its social structure have produced thousands of orphans and abandoned children, and thousands more whose impoverished mothers are willing to give them up.
The little Salvadoran girl who lost her brother was one of several victims of the adoption ring being investigated by the INS, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Massachusetts attorney-general's office.
"It is one of the largest if not the largest foreign adoption fraud that INS has ever seen," said William Granger, a senior official in the INS office in Boston.
It is also the second major "orphan scam" uncovered in Latin America in the last two years. In 1985, federal investigators broke up an
Arizona-based ring that falsely promised to provide children from Mexico to more than 40 couples.
Some U.S 1474196. diplomats and investigators believe the INS may have found only the tip of an iceberg, and questionable adoption rings may be operating throughout Central and South America.
"People sometimes say adoption fraud is a victimless crime," said Dr. William Pierce, president of the National Committee for Adoption. "But I don't think it's any such thing. Corruption has an effect. It's a very short step from selling kids to good homes to simply selling them to the highest bidder. "
U.S. officials say the INS has focused on what they describe as a Massachusetts baby broker named Suzanne Champney and the man who supplied babies for her, a Salvadoran lawyer named Roberto del Cid Aguirre. Federal prosecutors are reviewing evidence gathered by the INS for the Boston grand jury's investigation.
Although del Cid issued a general denial, he and Ms. Champney refused to comment on the specific allegations against them.
Investigators and adoption workers say del Cid has worked on hundreds of adoptions for parents in California, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, making him the busiest lawyer in the Salvadoran-U.S. baby trade. Many of the adoptions have been entirely normal, matching needy children with loving parents. But some, U.S. officials say, have been deeply flawed.
U.S. officials say del Cid has employed teams of women who went into the slums of El Salvador to persuade mothers to give up their babies. The officials said the women sometimes offered cash for the babies, a practice illegal under Salvadoran law. Del Cid has said that if cash was exchanged, he did not know of it and would not have approved.